Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony

Lewis Thomas

I cannot listen to Mahler's Ninth Symphony with anything like the old
melancholy mixed with the high pleasure I used to take from this music.
There was a time, not long ago, when what I heard, especially in the final
movement, was an open acknowledgement of death and at the same time a quiet
celebration of the tranquility connected to the process. I took this music
as a metaphor for reassurance, confirming my own strong hunch that the
dying of every living creature, the most natural of all experiences, has
to be a peaceful experience. I rely on nature. The long passages on all
the strings at the end, as close as music can come to expressing silence
itself, I used to hear as Mahler's idea of leave-taking at its best. But
always, I have heard this music as a solitary, private listener, thinking
about death.

Now I hear it differently. I cannot listen to the last movement of the
Mahler Ninth without the door-smashing intrusion of a huge new thought:
death everywhere, the dying of everything, the end of humanity. The easy
sadness expressed with such gentleness and delicacy by that repeated phrase
on faded strings, over and over again, no longer comes to me as old,
familiar news of the cycle of living and dying. All through the last notes
my mind swarms with images of a world in which the thermonuclear bombs have
begun to explode, in New York and San Francisco, in Moscow and Leningrad, in
Paris, in Paris, in Paris. In Oxford and Cambridge, in Edinburgh. I cannot
push away the thought of a cloud of radioactivity drifting along the Engadin,
from the Moloja Pass to Ftan, killing off the part of the earth I love more
than any other part.

I am old enough by this time to be used to the notion of dying, saddened by
the glimpse when it has occured but only transiently knocked down, able to
regain my feet quickly at the thought of continuity, any day. I have
acquired and held in affection until very recently another sideline of an
idea which serves me well at dark times: the life of the earth is the same
as the life of an organism: the great round being possesses a mind: the mind
contains an infinite number of thoughts and memories: when I reach my time I
may find myself still hanging around in some sort of midair, one of those
small thoughts, drawn back into the memory of the earth: in that peculiar
sense I will be alive.

Now all that has changed. I cannot think that way anymore. Not while those
things are still in place, aimed everywhere, ready for launching.

This is a bad enough thing for the people in my generation. We can put up
with it, I suppose, since we must. We are moving along anyway, like it or not.
I can even set aside my private fancy about hanging around, in midair.

What I cannot imagine, what I cannot put up with, the thought that keeps
grinding its way into my mind, making the Mahler into a hideous noise close
to killing me, is what it would be like to be young. How do the young stand
it? How can they keep their sanity? If I were very young, sixteen or
seventeen years old, I think I would begin, perhaps very slowly and
imperceptibly, to go crazy.

There is a short passage near the very end of the Mahler in which the almost
vanishing violins, all engaged in a sustained backward glance, are edged
aside for a few bars by the cellos. Those lower notes pick up fragments from
the first movement, as though prepared to begin everything all over again,
and then the cellos subside and disappear, like an exhalation. I used to hear
this as a wonderful few seconds of encouragement: we'll be back, we're still
here, keep going, keep going.

Now, with a pamphlet in front of me on a corner of my desk, published by the
Congressional Office of Technology Assessment, entitled MX Basing,
an analysis of all the alternative strategies for placement and protection of
hundreds of these missiles, each capable of creating artificial suns to
vaporize a hundred Hiroshimas, collectively capable of destroying the life
of any continent, I cannot hear the same Mahler. Now, those cellos sound in
my mind like the opening of all the hatches and the instant before ignition.

If I were sixteen or seventeen years old, I would not feel the cracking of
my own brain, but I would know for sure that the whole world was coming
unhinged. I can remember with some clarity what it was like to be sixteen. I
had discovered the Brahms symphonies. I knew that there was something
going on in the late Beethoven quartets that I would have to figure out, and
I knew that there was plenty of time ahead for all the figuing I would ever
have to do. I had never heard of Mahler. I was in no hurry. I was a college
sophomore and had decided that Wallace Stevens and I possessed a
comprehensive understanding of everything needed for a life. The years
stretched away forever ahead, forever. My great-great grandfather had come
from Wales, leaving his signature in the family Bible on the same page that
carried, a century later, my father's signature. It never crossed my mind to
worry about the twenty-first century; it was just there, given, somewhere in
the sure distance.

The man on television, Sunday midday, middle-aged and solid, nice-looking
chap, all the facts at his fingertips, more dependable looking than most
high-school principals, is talking about civilian defense, his responsibility
in Washington. It can make an enormous diffference, he is saying. Instead
of the outright death of eighty milliom American citizens in twenty minutes,
he says, we can, by careful planning and practice, get that number down to
only forty million, maybe even twenty. The thing to do, he says, is to
evacuate the cities quickly and have everyone get under shelter in the
countryside. That way we can recover, and meanwhile we will have retaliated,
incinerating all of Soviet society, he says. What about radioactive fallout?
he is asked. Well, he says. Anyway, he says, if the Russians know they can
only destroy forty million of us instead of eighty million, this will deter
them. Of course, he adds, they have the capacity to kill all two hundred and
twenty million of us if they try real hard, but they know we can do the same to
them. If the figure is only forty million this will deter them, not worth
the trouble, not worth the risk. Eighty million would be another matter,
we should guard ourselves against losing that many all at once, he says.

If I were sixteen or seventeen years old and had to listen to that, or read
things like that, I would want to give up listening and reading. I would
begin thinking up new kinds of sounds, different from any music heard before,
and I would be twisting and turning to rid myself of human language.